Nuts and Bolts

<p>Writer Caroline Fraser argues a chilling link between industrial poison, deadly design, and a generation of serial killers in the Pacific Northwest.</p> <p><p>Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of 99% Invisible ad-free and a whole week early.&nbsp;<br><b ... Show More

<p>People once dreamed of sidewalks that could whisk them across cities. Somehow, that dream ended up at the airport.</p> <p><p>Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of 99% Invisible ad-free and a whole week early.&nbsp;<br><br>Start a free trial now on Apple ... Show More

<p>Comedy writer Elliott Kalan (The Daily Show, <a href="https://www.flophousepodcast.com" target="_blank">The Flop House</a>, <a href="https://mst3k.com" target="_blank">Mystery Science Theater 3000</a>, and co-host of the <a href="https://99percentinvisible.org/powerbroker" tar ... Show More

Datshiane Navanayagam meets two engineers who want more women to become inventors. Roma Agrawal is best known for her work on The Shard, the UK’s tallest building. She’s also the author of Nuts & Bolts, a book which explores the history of seven tiny but fundamental inventions th ... Show More

The 15th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, published in 1974, cost $32 million to create. The largest investment in publishing history. And yet you can now buy the complete set for pennies. Who invented encyclopedias? Who wrote for them? And why did Samuel Taylor Coleridge ... Show More

The two key ingredients that enabled the mass production of steel. We travel to Sheffield - the birthplace of modern steelmaking - to get up close to the technological mid-wife, a Bessemer converter. Plus we visit the modern Forgemasters steelworks, to get a taste of just how har ... Show More

<p>How do you define a "big book"? It might be a new offering from a beloved author or a deep dive into a timely subject or a story that has generated unusual enthusiasm among editors and other early readers: One way or another, these are the books that build "buzz" and create mo ... Show More

Author Dave Eggars has written a new book, The Every, satirizing technology and it's ever-expanding hold on us. While publishing and distributing the book, which also happens to be about a tech giant overextending its reach, he tried to keep it out of the hands of one of today's ... Show More

Dan Widmaier is the founder and CEO of Bolt Threads. They make materials from nature that are high performance, but hard to extract, and develop technology that makes the scaling of production on these materials possible. Today, they're making spider silk affordable to the averag ... Show More

Long abandoned metal mines are having a huge impact on rivers across the UK. BBC Inside Science reporter Patrick Hughes visits Cwmystwyth in Wales, where he finds lead, zinc and cadmium seeping into waterways. It’s the costly legacy left after hundreds of years of mining. Roma Ag ... Show More

My guest today is Gemma Milne, the science/tech writer and author of Smoke & Mirrors: How Hype Obscures the Future and How to See Past It . Her works have been featured in the BBC, The Times and she is the co-founder of Science: Disrupt – a media outlet covering advances in scien ... Show More

<p>James McBride’s novel “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store” was one of the most celebrated books of 2023 — a critical darling and a New York Times best seller. In their piece for the Book Review, Danez Smith called it “a murder mystery locked inside a Great American Novel” and pr ... Show More

Paris feiert den Ingenieur des Eiffelturms – 100 Jahre nach seinem Tod. Brücken, Viadukte, Kathedralen, ein Bahnhof und die Struktur der Freiheitsstatue – 700 Bauwerke aus seiner Werkstatt verteilen sich über 30 Länder. Auf allen Kontinenten hat er Spuren hinterlassen, nur nicht ... Show More